Masculinity in Late-Imperial Russian Peasant Society

Abstract

Two seemingly contradictory images of the Russian peasantry stand out in the representations of the late eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. One image is that of the peasant as child. Like a child, he is at times docile and other times willful, but he is always ready to cower fearfully before authority. The other representation is of the fierce, out-of-control peasant who can no longer contain his personality under the mask of the child but instead becomes violent as a raging beast, destroying everything that stands in his way. In both cases the peasant by definition is male. The peasant-as-child image surfaced at the height of the oppressive serf system in the late eighteenth century, when a paternalistic state and nobility viewed bondaged peasants as requiring their continual guidance and superior knowledge. The specter of the dangerous raging-beast-of-a-peasant originated with the 1773–4 Pugachev Rebellion, when peasants led by Emelian Pugachev in protest against the extension of serfdom into the southeast threatened the security of Moscow. So powerful was the image of the violent peasant that Tsar Alexander II was able in 1856 to invoke it before the Russian nobility as a justification for emancipation. By noting that the peasants would free themselves if the government did not liberate them, he implied that the peasants would murder their owners. Not surprisingly, the figure of the irrational and violent peasant re-emerged in the revolutionary upheavals of 1905 and 1917.